Frank Hopper: Alaska Native Brotherhood was about resistance

My earliest memory of Seattle is of sitting underneath our front porch in Georgetown. Under those wooden steps I found a hiding place away from the other kids I barely knew, and most importantly away from my mother. It was my third birthday.

Our family moved from Juneau, Alaska to Seattle two months before and I thought we were just here visiting my Aunt Judy. I thought we’d stay a few days in this strange place and then return to Juneau as my mom and I had done once before. But the days away from Juneau became weeks and then months. Finally, on my birthday, I understood. We weren’t going back. It was all a trick, no, a punishment. I was bad. My father discovered this and to punish me he took Juneau away. Worse yet, my mother had been in on it the whole time. That’s how my 3-year-old mind perceived my Caucasian father’s and my Tlingit mother’s decision to assimilate into white society by moving to Seattle.

Assimilation is a quiet process that destroys indigenous cultures by absorbing and diluting them. “Resistance is futile,” the Borg would say in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

But it’s not. When you see it coming you can protect what’s most important and survive. You can resist. That’s what the early leaders of the Alaska Native Brotherhood did. In his recent book, A Dangerous Idea: The Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Struggle for Indigenous Rights, (University of Alaska, 2014) author Peter Metcalfe documents how Native leaders in Southeast Alaska fought the oncoming firestorm of assimilation a century ago.